Hardware

Primeur magazine

Edition: weekly - Issue:
2016-01-04

Exascale supercomputing

A new metamaterial with an unusual refraction of light will speed up computers A team of scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in the Russian Academy of Sciences has proposed a two-dimensional metamaterial composed of silver elements, that refracts light in an unusual way. The research has been published on November 18, 2015 inOptical Material Express. In the future, these structures will be able to be used to develop compact optical devices, as well as to create an 'invisibility cloak'.
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The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the "wicked" problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, according to researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University. In an article published in the journalScience, the authors present a new vision of human computation - the science of crowd-powered systems, which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.
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Quantum computing

A research group at Osaka University has succeeded in observing at the intended timing two-phonon quantum interference by using two cold calcium ions in ion traps, which spatially confine charged particles. A phonon is a unit of vibrational energy that arises from oscillating particles within crystals. Two-particle quantum interference experiments using two photons or atoms have been previously reported, but this group's achievement is the world's first observation using two phonons.
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